how important is increased aoe on a shock wave totem

So I am building a shock wave totem build , because why not.

and I obviously have taken the easy blast radius notable in the witch tree, my big question then is should i take the aoe nodes in the templar tree?

Keep in mind I am a low life build, so mana nodes , mana regen nodes , life nodes , str nodes all do nothing for my build.


my current set up is



currently there is much room for things i can add or subtract seeing as this is a level 81 build.

that being said it would take 11 skill pts to get the Templar aoe nodes and half of the nodes on the way to templar are pointless filler. 11 pts for 20 inc aoe and 8 inc area damae

i pondered trying to get the aoe nodes from the scion , but most or all the scion nodes are terrible . and require going through unneeded or some of the worst nodes bubbles in existence to get to what i want.

7 pts to get 12 inc aoe but atleast 3 of those 7 are increased cast speed even if they are 25% worse than all other cast speed bubbles ( i thought all bubbles were supposed to have notable GGG)

i will have a q20 inc aoe gem to over compensate the conc effect gem i have


I have been playing with the shock waves at level 46 and they do decent damage but their aoe is pathetic , really small for a totem that knocks crap back, 3 - 4 bursts and mobs are out of range.


thoughts?

I am a big fan of high AoE:) .. increasing radius increses area covered exponentially

at your question: My personal opinion is that it is not worth spending 11 points on it.

hint: units are integer values that allways round down. SWT has 20 base radius, so every 5% inrease/decrease will add/subtract one unit. Witch cluster + 20/20 AoE gem + conc effect result in 33% increase. 6% from corrupted belt would make it 39%, so you would still miss 1% to another breakpoint.

21/20 AoE gem would solve this. If you cant afford that, there is no need to have 20/20 gem, because you would aim for 35% increase only

I had the same situation. I ended up taking the lazy path just swap in and out the concentrated effect gem for the extra AOE when fighting non-boss or single target. Used the points for more HP instead.

what if i removed the 3 casting nodes in the witch tree, and took the 3 3% in the scion tree, yes i lose 3% cast speed BUT

technically i get 12% increased aoe for just 4 passives vs 11 or 7 , taking into account what has already been said is that 12% worth 4 points and the loss of 3% cast speed?

Keep in mind that the faster casting gem is additive , not multiplicative , where as the damage gems (conc effect and added fire ) are multiplicative.

so losing that 3% does not hurt as much.

you want to use conc effect in order to do so you need to compensate with kickass aoe

just an example of my dps for swt with hatred

dps without conc 13898

with conc 23296 you see conc is insanely useful

54% aoe increase is enough at least for me

So yes to scion nodes or no? Also that dps 1 or two totems